Research Guides: Essays and Essayists: Find Essays through Databases

Essay-specific databases

Essay & General Literature Index
Essay and General Literature Index allows users to locate essays published in anthologies, annual and serial essay collections, and miscellaneous works published in the United States, Great Britain and Canada. The Index covers essay collections published from 1985 to the present.
Essay & General Literature Index Retrospective
Essay & General Literature Index Retrospective contains citations for essays in collections and anthologies from 1900 to 1984. Coverage focuses on the humanities and social sciences, including literary works, art history, drama, and film and publications from the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain.
Past Masters
Provides primary source full-text electronic editions of selected texts from the humanities, including works by philosophers and political economists.

Literature-specific databases

Unlike the general databases, literature (or any subject) specific databases generally focus solely on journal articles as a publication type and do not have a broad, multidisciplinary approach.

Literature Resource Center
Literature Resource Center offers biographical and other background information for research on literary topics, authors, and their works. Its coverage includes all genres and disciplines, all time periods, and all regions of the world. Literature Resource Center's content comes from the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and more, including full text of selected poems, plays, and short stories.
MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB)
The MLA International Bibliography provides bibliographic records for books, book chapters, journal articles, and dissertations published in the fields of modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Full text is available for some articles. The MLAIB covers items published from around 1920 to the present.
Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI)
This database indexes about 1,700 arts and humanities journals. Dates of coverage: 1975 to present.
Adjust settings to expand your searching to include the Social Sciences Citation Index, the Science Citation Index, the Book Citation Index, and others.

General Databases

General databases contain content from a variety of subject areas as well as a number of different publication types. They will allow you to look at your topic from a wide perspective.

Be sure to use the search refinements each database may offer, including: date, document type, and source type.

ProQuest Central
ProQuest Central is a large, multidisciplinary database with over 11,000 titles, with over 8,000 titles in full-text. It serves as the central resource for researchers at all levels in all markets. Over 160 subjects areas are covered extensively in this product including business and economics, health and medical, news and world affairs, technology, social sciences and more.
OmniFile Full Text Mega
OmniFile Full Text Mega is a Multi-disciplinary database providing the complete content - indexing, abstracts, and full text - from six collections: Education Full Text, General Science Full Text, Humanities Full Text, Readers' Guide Full Text, Social Sciences Full Text, and Wilson Business Full Text. Dates of coverage: 1982 to present.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to scholarly journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to journal articles, users can access book chapters, ebooks, and primary source documents.
Project Muse
Provides full-text access to high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from scholarly publishers.

Database Search Tips

Here are some tips for better search results in databases.

This usage works on most databases, but check 'Help' sections for supported search syntax.

Boolean: (using operators: and, or, not)

mother AND father searches for occurrences of both words within scope defined.
mother OR father searches for one or all, but both are not required.
mother NOT father searches for occurrences of the word ‘mother’ without use of the word ‘father.’
(mother NOT father) AND god searches for occurrences of the word ‘mother’ without use of the word ‘father,’ then also requires the word ‘god.’

Truncation:

art* (asterisk as truncation character) searches for art, arts, artistic, artful, etc.

Wildcard:

m?n (question mark as wildcard character) searches for man and men.